Facilitating with Ease!

Core Skills for Facilitators, Team Leaders and Members, Managers, Consultants, and Trainers

Ingrid Bens

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118046753
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Facilitating with Ease! is an updated version of the best-selling resource that offers easy-to-follow instructions, techniques, and hands-on tools that team leaders, consultants, supervisors, and managers have used to learn the basics of facilitation. Complete with worksheets on CD-ROM that can be customized to fit your personal needs, it's a complete facilitation workshop in a take-home format. Facilitating with Ease! shows you how to run productive meetings with skill and authority and includes the information needed to train others in your organization to become confident facilitators as well. The book is filled with dozens of exercises, surveys, and checklists that can be used to transform anyone into an effective facilitator.

Chapter 1

Understanding Facilitation

The purpose of facilitation is enhanced group effectiveness.

In many organizations, the idea of using a neutral third party to manage and improve meetings is now taking root. The result: the emergence of a new and important role in which the person who manages the meeting no longer participates in the discussion or tries to influence the outcome. Instead, he or she stays out of the discussion in order to focus on how the meeting is being run. Instead of offering opinions, this person provides participants with structure and tools. Instead of promoting a point of view, he or she manages participation to insure that everyone is being heard. Instead of making decisions and giving orders, he or she supports the participants in identifying their own goals and developing their own action plans.

More and more organizations are now adopting this role within their meetings. In all of the above examples, the meeting manager was acting as a facilitator.

What Is Facilitation?

A meeting without a facilitator is about as effective as a team trying to have a game without a referee.

Facilitation is a way of providing leadership without taking the reins. It’s the facilitator’s job to get others to assume responsibility and take the lead.

Here’s an example: Your employees bring you a problem, but instead of offering them solutions, you offer them a method with which they can develop their own answers. You attend the meetings to guide the members through their discussions, step-by-step, encouraging them to reach their own conclusions.

Rather than being a player, a facilitator acts more like a referee. That means you watch the action, more than participate in it. You control which activities happen. You keep your finger on the pulse and know when to move on or wrap things up. Most important, you help members define and reach their goals.

What Does a Facilitator Do?

Facilitators make their contribution by:

• helping the group define its overall goal, as well as its specific objectives

• helping members assess their needs and create plans to meet them

• providing processes that help members use their time efficiently to make high-quality decisions

• guiding group discussion to keep it on track

• making accurate notes that reflect the ideas of members

• helping the group understand its own processes in order to work more effectively

• making sure that assumptions are surfaced and tested

• supporting members in assessing their current skills, as well as building new skills

• using consensus to help a group make decisions that take all members’ opinions into account

• supporting members in managing their own interpersonal dynamics

• providing feedback to the group, so that they can assess their progress and make adjustments

• managing conflict using a collaborative approach

• helping the group communicate effectively

• helping the group access resources from inside and outside the group

• creating a positive environment in which members can work productively to attain group goals

• fostering leadership in others by sharing the responsibility for leading the group

• teaching and empowering others to facilitate

Facilitation is a helping role.

The bottom line goal of facilitation is group effectiveness.

What Do Facilitators Believe?

Facilitators believe that two heads are better than one.

Facilitators believe that two heads are better than one, and that to do a good job, people need to be fully engaged and empowered.

All facilitators firmly believe that:

• people are intelligent, capable and want to do the right thing

• groups can make better decisions than any one person can make alone

• everyone’s opinion is of equal value, regardless of rank or position

• people are more committed to the ideas and plans that they have helped to create

• participants can be trusted to assume accountability for their decisions

• groups can manage their own conflicts, behaviors and relationships if they are given the right tools and training

• the process, if well designed and honestly applied, can be trusted to achieve results

In contrast to the old notion of leadership, in which the leader was viewed as the most important person at the table, a facilitator puts the members first. Members decide what the goals are, make the decisions, implement action plans and hold themselves accountable for achieving results. The facilitator’s contribution is to offer the right methods and tools at the right time.

Facilitating is ultimately about shifting responsibility from the leader to the members, from management to employees. By playing a process role, we encourage the members to take charge of the content.

What Are Typical Facilitator Assignments?

As a facilitator you could be asked to design and lead a wide variety of meetings. These might include:*

• a strategic planning session

• a session to clarify objectives and create detailed results indicators

• a priority-setting meeting

• a team-building session

• a program review/evaluation session

• a communications/liaison meeting

• a meeting to negotiate team roles and responsibilities

• a problem-solving meeting

• a meeting to share feedback and improve performance

• a focus group to gather input on a new program or product

*Sample agendas for a wide range of meetings have been provided in Chapter 9.

Differentiating Between Process and Content

The two words you’ll hear over and over again in facilitation are process (how) and content (what). They are the two dimensions of any interaction between people.

The content of any meeting is what is being discussed: the task at hand, the subjects being dealt with and the problems being solved. The content is expressed in the agenda and the words that are spoken. Because it’s the verbal portion of the meeting, the content is obvious and typically consumes the attention of the members.

Process deals with how things are being discussed: the methods, procedures, format and tools used. The process also includes the style of the interaction, the group dynamics and the climate that’s established. Because the process is silent, it’s harder to pinpoint. It’s the aspect of most meetings that’s largely unseen and often ignored, while people are focused on the content.

A facilitator’s job is to manage the process and leave the content to the participants.

Content	Process
What	How
The task	The methods
The subjects for discussion	How relations are maintained
The problems being solved	The tools being used
The decisions made	The rules or norms set
The agenda items	The group dynamics
The goals	The climate

When a meeting leader offers an opinion with the intent of influencing the outcome of discussions, she or he is acting as the “content leader.”

In summary, a facilitator’s job...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Understanding Facilitation
• Chapter 2 - Facilitation Stages
• Chapter 3 - Knowing Your Participants
• Chapter 4 - Creating Participation
• Chapter 5 - Effective Decision Making
• Chapter 6 - Facilitating Conflict
• Chapter 7 - Meeting Management
• Chapter 8 - Process Tools for Facilitators
• Chapter 9 - Process Designs
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography